Stories – Page 2 – Per Design

The adventures of the holidays 2007-2008 edition

Here’s a brief outline of our recent adventures as experienced by my wife and I:

Taxi didn’t come as expected to take us to the airport.

Activated plan b and drove to the airport (requiring long-term parking)

Missed getting on flight because of 15 minutes and an unhelpful airline worker who wasn’t willing to try

desperate attempts to resolve the now-approaching-fiasco-proportions problem requires going home and buying new airline tickets (through a different airline). This is slightly amusing in that this second airline uses the first airline to fly out of this particular airport and that the first airline didn’t “show” any available flights.

So we buy new tickets. It will now become a 3 step flight – Lansing to Atlanta to Las Vegas. But at least we will be where we expected to be within 24 hours.

We call the appropriate family members so they will know when we will be showing up

The flight goes well and smoothly and we arrive in Vegas to enjoy Christmas. Our holiday includes a trip north to visit the grandparents and family in Utah, where we also enjoy some beautiful snow and sledding.

On the 28th we flew out of Vegas to visit Seattle and my folks. The trip is about perfect. A kid on the plane wonders how I can read so fast as I’m already on page 185 of a big book.

We arrive in Seattle and are treated royally by the family. Parties and fun ensue. “Risk” is proven to be time consuming and stressful when played against other humans. It doesn’t help when you’re related to them either.

January 3rd arrives and its time to leave. At the airport we discover a problem. Our first flight is going to be delayed by an hour. Our connecting flight only has a layover of 45 minutes. Fortunately the airline worker was quite helpful and eventually found us an alternative flight – however it would be a late-night and we wouldn’t get to Lansing until 11 am the next day. However this is much better then being delayed by a whole 24 hours which would be our other option. So we get to enjoy another “last” supper with the family before leaving to make our 10 pm flight to Detroit.

After a 3 hour layover in Detroit, we arrive, finally, at Lansing at 11 am. At this point I’m running on about 2-3 hours of sleep. Removing snow and ice from the car takes a good 15-20 minutes (looks like we got about a foot). Long term parking costs add to an already expensive trip, but Kaylee and I both agree – it was worth it to see family.

And that’s why I didn’t show up to work as expected on Friday…I hope your holidays weren’t quite as adventurous!

Funny Work Stories December 5th, 2007

Funny story from work: So a client had their website redesigned (after my redesign which got royally messed up by how many navigation buttons they wanted stick on) and they chose a different company to do it. The design looks good and does a great job of capturing the problematic navigation that killed my design. But as clients are wont, they decided to flip some colors around and add another button (obviously this client is predisposed to add buttons). The client didn’t want to use the original designer for whatever reason and decided to use us (again). The color switching and adding the new button went really well after we bought the missing font that the original designer had used. Anyway the images were fine and dandy. And this is now where the story gets funny. I’m looking at the HTML and CSS and find that there are a bjillion different stylesheets. Each page in the site has its own 2 stylesheets. Mind boggling crazy it becomes funny. But that’s not the worst of it. I drop in the images into the proper folder(s – don’t get me started on how they organized the file structure) and open up the appropriate style sheets to make some text color changes appropriate to the image color changes I’ve made. To make sure that I edit the correct style I also open up one of the html files – and I spot a <p class=”heading”>. I think, huh, that’s interesting, because generally one uses an <h> tag for headings…And as I look over the HTML code and the CSS I start to laugh as it becomes clear no <h> tags were used throughout the entire page! Although to be honest I didn’t search that hard. There’s nothing wrong with <p class=”heading”> but when it’s being used to replace an <h> tag, it’s not semantic or appropriate! That and the various non-breaking space code that littered the page made me laugh. Someone new to CSS perhaps?

Who knew?

This second year at MSU for my wife has been a royal pain. The College of Engineering requires my wife to be a TA this semester. Thats all fine and good. Her professor requested the College to assign her to one of that professors classes. This ensures that the professor can get quality time from my wife in the research lab as well as TA’ing her class. So the college assigns my wife to said classes. WITHOUT CHECKING MY WIFE’S CLASS SCHEDULE! So what do you know…a scheduling conflict. So my wife goes in and asks the College to help resolve this problem. College replies (sort of) that it’s her problem, she agreed to TA. And then they make the wife do a lot of grunt work to fix a problem that really wasn’t her fault. So a note to future students of MSU – be very wary of the College of Engineering – its not at all like what you think it should be. There’s a bunch of other little niggling things about MSU but this one so far has taken the cake.